I think this is a great initiative by Microsoft. They have shown that they greatly care about the environment and common good. Not only that, but they spend lots of money on their R&D (Microsoft Research) which has come up with tons of great things that has made the world better.

On top of that Microsoft's founder Bill Gates has spent most of his fortune [wikipedia.org] to help the world, especially for healthcare and making the poor countries better. Even if you don't like MS products you have to have deep respect for them for this reason. Compare this to Google CEO's who spend their money on luxury yachts [dailymail.co.uk].

They're a big proponent of alternative commutes, so there's lots of incentive to bike to work, carpool, etc. http://www.gortrip.com/ [gortrip.com] . Everyone gets a free bus pass. (yeah, I know everyone can write off ~$120 a month in taxes for using public transit, but not every company bothers with it).

They also run a pretty generous on-demand shuttle service around their campus and surrounding facilities. (I know Google does the same, but we never hear about the M$ one.) They also have a special bus that ferrys like 12 bikes at a time across the 520 bridge, since the city busses can only 3 at a time.

Also, most of their cafeteria stuff is compostable, which leads to some hilarity because all their compostable plastic utensils melt in hot food / drinks. But it's great fun using that to demonstrate to visitors how strong the coffee is.

Since you're arbitrarily comparing Microsoft founders to Google CEOs (as if that was even in any way relevant to his story) it seems a little ironic you'd bring up private yachts, when Paul Allen is infamous for his own "mega yacht" [wikipedia.org]

As I always say: the level of your charity is defined by how much you have left when you're done.A poor man with two dollars who gives one is far more generous than a rich man with 40 billion who gives 39 billion.

As I always say: the level of your charity is defined by how much you have left when you're done.A poor man with two dollars who gives one is far more generous than a rich man with 40 billion who gives 39 billion.

On the other hand, one dollar isn't enough to buy a single cup of coffee these days, whereas 39 billion dollars could improve the lives of a substantial number of people.

Your definition of generosity might be useful for deciding who gets in to Heaven, but it doesn't have much to say about who is making a difference in the world.

And you would be wrong with that argument. Even if you assume MS is responsible for all the jobs lost at netscape and word perfect plus 10 other companies of similar size you would be wrong. Those people went on to get other jobs and life went on. Weigh that against the 10s of thousands of lives that MS money has saved and harm done just doesn't compare.

It' was stupid. Should have used that 2 dollars to get a pencil and paper and make a plan, then spend his time implementing his plan. In 5 years when he goes from nothing to middle class, he can then donate more money, and eat.

Your idea of charity is short sighted, and, frankly, stupid.But you keep reciting shit religion has been telling people in order to get there last 2 dollar for as long as there has been religion.

Should have used that 2 dollars to get a pencil and paper and make a plan, then spend his time implementing his plan. In 5 years when he goes from nothing to middle class, he can then donate more money, and eat.

This is a canard that helps us sleep at night. If only poor people worked harder or planned ahead, they would dig themselves out of poverty. For every story you find where this is successful, I could show you 100 people who worked as hard, planned as well, and ended up still poor. Bad planning or a bad work ethic is not what makes people poor. It's a confluence of factors that are by and large out of the individual's control.

To suggest otherwise simplifies a very complex and important global issue. Certainly there are elements of any population that just don't work hard, but that is generally not the case. You can argue that it isn't your place to help someone out of poverty; you can say that poverty is inevitable, but to allay your fears or guilt by claiming a person with only two dollars should write a five year plan to solve his woes and provide for others is extremely overly-simplified, don't you think? His idea of charity is not stupid. It is noble. We could compromise and say foolhardy if you wish. Nevertheless, kindness to another human being, whether you think people who do so are indoctrinated by religion or just plain caring, is something beautiful.

I know I'm blowing against the wind, but I'd suggest you tone down the name calling too. I know, I know...this is/., but I'm a romantic and believe people can have a civil discourse on important issues.

Why is that a canard? Do you believe individuals simply float on a wave of historical forces, and the *lucky ones* inevitability say it was their hard work that got them where they are?
Instead of saying "It's a confluence of factors that are by and large out of the individual's control...", the fact is people make choices every minute of every day that affect the well-being of themselves and those around them:
Do I spend or save?
Do I get things done or do I procrastinate?
Do I watch TV or go exercise

Do you believe individuals simply float on a wave of historical forces, and the *lucky ones* inevitability say it was their hard work that got them where they are?

No. I believe the people who are successful generally work very hard for their success. They persevere in the face of extreme difficulty and use their talents to great effect. I never discounted hard work. I'm saying that not every person that works hard will eventually rise out of poverty. There are many other contributing factors.

I get it! If I get paid one penny at a time, keep no savings and donate some of my first pennies in each pay cheque, I'll be the most generous man in the world!

I'm no fan of MS or Gates, to be honest, but that is way too simplistic. Giving 39 of 40 billion is obviously more generous, because of the difficulty in regaining it and the enormous amount of power surrendered.

It's not like other MS founders don't have luxury yachts. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Octopus_(yacht), and lots of rich people don't necessarily feel the need to give the money to charity which may not be all that effective and robs governments of tax revenue from estate taxes (where such things exist) http://www.onlinecardonation.org/charitynews/archives/102.

It's not like MS trying to go carbon neutral is a bad thing. Both Google and apple have massive solar power generators, and there are lots of peopl

The right amount of CO2 is good. A bit more won't hurt. A lot more is bad. See it as water: Water is good for you, if you don't have it you'll die. If you have the right amount of water you live. A bit more water than you need won't hurt. Drowning (to much water) is bad. One of the big questions with CO2 is: what is a little more than the right amount and what is a lot more (the right amount being what we have had for centuries)?

I find amusing that while everybody claims to know how capitalism works, they still get wrong.

Repeat with me:

The only relationships between costs and price is that, IF MY PRICE GOES BELOW MY COSTS, I GO BROKE.

If I get a product for free, I can sell it for $1 or $1.000.000. The decission will be based in which price gives me more profits (perhaps at $1 I get so many customers that it offsets the lower prices, in the other hand it will mean that I will have bigger production/distribution costs). With many products, market share is very affected by price, but that is not universal (you only get one dose of a vaccine, no matter how cheap the second one is; no matter how expensive is it, you will a bottle of water if you are in the middle of the desert).

The theory says that if I get a big difference between price and cost (-> profit) then other bussinesmen will catch up and enter my bussiness, leading to competition and eventually lowering prices. Of course, what is not usually said is the long list of "exceptions":

*) My product is unique -let it be by its properties, by copyright or even by marketing/branding-; nobody can copy it.

*) Time to market is big: even if the other bussinesmen begin trying to catch me today, they will spend years until they get a product ready (think of designing a car, or a full new OS).

*) Investment is big: bussinesmen do not have enough capital to invest as they should in this market, if they ask for loans the interest to pay will be a significant disavantage against me. And when if they finally get to do it, I am in a good position to dump prices so they can not recoup their investments, let alone get benefits (this one works better when coupled with the previous ones, see nuclear electricity).

Sorry buy there is another real and true relationship between cost and price. It's called integrity, a sense of fairness. So as an estimator contract administrator in the highly competitive building industry, even though at many oppurtunities I could get away with 100% markup or more, I did not and only held to the original profit margin upon which the contract was based even when it was not disclosed.

Pride in profession, a sense of truly delivering valuable service to your fellow human beings, a degree

You are entitled to your integrity, fairness, pride, however you word it. You are entitled to decrease your benefits whatever you want due to these issues (in fact, it is not that different from MS buying carbon credits).

However, if we go back to economic theory, these issues are counted as "cost of opportunity"... all of the money that you could be doing but that you do not get. (note that it is not the same that accepting now a lower profit in the hope of increased bussiness with

Which is exactly why economist never understand why companies go belly up when they get caught ripping off their customers while the companies psychopathic executives wander off with the bonuses and golden parachute. The world is littered with bankrupt companies employing your thinking, whilst companies that demonstrate and maintain integrity can survive centuries.

I think it would be somewhat dangerous as an empty marketing ploy. There is enough sentiment against both Microsoft and environmentalism to ensure that in a couple years somebody will at least try to prove this effort was either futile or undertaken cynically in the first place.

I assure you Accenture is doing plenty of evil all by itself, I wasn't confusing them with anyone else. For one little example, they are acting as a patent troll, trying to put smaller competitors out of business with completely bogus patent claims.

They use a lot of electricity. Unless Microsoft is planning to buy "carbon offset" credits, so they can pollute and yet just handwave it away.

I'd prefer they take a pledge to be megabyte neutral, and learn to develop a new OS that doesn't use any more megabytes of RAM (or virtual ram) then Windows 7. Ditto for Office, Visio, and other products.

Here in Europe, you are already "payed for using less electricity" because the carbon market thing has raised your electricity price. Unfortunately, electricity users are all either paying more or at least the same. Carbon neutral electricity producers are the ones making money.

Yup, but it also means that Microsoft will (indirectly) be paying for that improvement. It's hard to see that as a bad thing.

True as long as the carbon credits are priced in the right ballpark.

The idea is to turn an externality (a cost to society at large) to something the "invisible hand" of the market will take care of fixing. As long as the market for carbon credits is well regulated it does not get any more libertarian than this.

Earlier this month, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency recognized Microsoft as the third largest purchaser of green power in the U.S., purchasing more than 1.5 billion kilowatt-hours (kWh) of green power annually. This is enough green power to offset 46 percent of our electricity use, and is the annual equivalent to taking more than 150,000 passenger vehicles off the road.

So it's a a lot more the offsets.

Carbon offset vary. Some are good , some are pretty thin. I didn't see that the spe

They use a lot of electricity. Unless Microsoft is planning to buy "carbon offset" credits, so they can pollute and yet just handwave it away.

They can also claim their Microsoft-branded hardware like the XBox, keyboards, mice, etc., are all made by other companies, so they're not responsible for anything but the ink used to print "Microsoft" on it. And having dug into their statement... it appears they've done exactly that. They appear to be claiming only their offices and data centers towards the "carbon neutral" claim. It's not hard to claim you're "carbon neutral" when all you do is lease office space and consume electricity. -_- I'll believe

I agree mostly with you. Yu're right, they can directly mitigate their own emissions when possible, and buy renewable energy credits to cover the rest. RECs aren't hand waving. It's an established system for optimizing and maximizing green hous gas reductions across the economy.

I don't know about all operations, but the bulk of development work, and most internal servers and such, are in Redmond, and elsewhere in Puget Sound area. Most electricity generated there comes from hydro - about 75% - and you can actually get 100% renewable sourcing for your own power bill if you're willing to pay extra to the power distribution company (they'll basically buy more kWh from "green" provides with that money, even if their prices are higher).

I'd prefer they take a pledge to be megabyte neutral, and learn to develop a new OS that doesn't use any more megabytes of RAM (or virtual ram) then Windows 7

This is essentially what the bar is for Win8 - it should run on any PC that runs Win7 today, which in practice means same or lower RAM usage. It's actually lower overall, because of all optimizations that had to be done to squeeze it onto tablets (for the ARM edition especially), which still have an effect on desktop machines.

Even with "carbon off-set credits" you are generally not carbon neutral.

Carbon neutral to me means: not adding any extra carbon to the atmosphere (typically as CO2). This means that for ever ton of carbon emitted thanks to burning of fossil fuels for electricity for office, or for fuel for a trip by plane, you would have to take out a ton of carbon back from the atmosphere.

Growing trees is not doing much: only when a tree grows it takes in carbon. Most forests, when fully grown, don't take in much, as the d

And I think it's roughly neutral in terms of good and bad. Here's my personal summary:I'm assuming that the things written in the article are true.

The good:- Microsoft will spend money on planting trees and all that jazz with the carbon offsets.- This loss of money will promote efficiency as a cheaper alternative to buying offsets.- More large companies publicly reacting to climate change might be some evidence to deniers that this is not some kind of hippy nonsense.

Microsoft's pledge includes their use of the services you mentioned. If all the customers of all airlines, for example, were carbon neutral including their use of air transport, then the problem is solved. Whether that's possible I don't know, but since we are hardly even making an effort yet, large gains are relatively easy.

They aren't just a software company. They have a huge amount of online services which consist of a large number of datacenters and hundreds of thousands of servers around the world. not to mention all their offices and services staff.

If every company in the world became carbon neutral, then Google might have accomplished something big. Now, given what the electricity situation is in Japan at the moment, the real news is going to be when Sony or Hitachi goes neutral.

Yeah, the whole article is just a business case for this because they know what would happen if there wasn't a business case. And there wouldn't be a business case, but for carbon taxes. Exactly how it was supposed to work. Good job, government. Good job doing what you had to do, MS.

MS can power their data centers from the hot air put forth by Ballmer's mouth.
This is the second time I have posted this comment... the first mysteriously disappeared. I am really beginning to wonder who foots the bills at/.

Don't forget that this is a company whose entire business model is based on planned obsolescence and the endless hardware upgrade treadmill. Without that carbon-belching "ecosystem" of hardware "partners", Microsoft would be toast.

A similarly meaningless situation would occur if Bucyrus, the producer of gargantuan coal strip mining machines, had made their factories "carbon neutral".

Heh. "Carbon neutral" is mostly a bunch of BS.The cheapest way to be "carbon neutral" is to hand some country, preferably the cheapest one possible, a bunch of cash to plant some trees that they might have been planning to plant anyway, probably some monoculture to replace hills that had been burned or chopped clear of trees already.

Or you can pay someone to promise not to burn stuff through a project they may not have been wanting to do anyway.

If the world actually tried to make the human race anywhere *near* carbon neutral it *would* be hideously expensive."herp derp"

Eh, not much. Here is a report from the Royal Academy of Engineering [countryguardian.net]. Using today's technology, if we build new power plants to produce our electricity from wind power rather than natural gas (the cheapest option) then we pay twice as much per kWh. (That's including standby costs.)

Now obviously using current technology we can't go 100% wind power (something has to *provide* standby), plus we'd need electric cars to reduce carbon emissions from transportation. However we have everything to get started now,

Maybe we should drop the term "carbon neutral" and call it environmentalism.

Also, is global warming, if it exists, man-made or not? Does it matter? Environmentalism for the sake of less pollution. I don't care if being "green" stops global warming. Stop pollution for the sake of stopping pollution.

I agree that pollution can't be good, so we should stop it irrespective of whether it can be proved to be actually linked to specific badness like climate change. However, Using the term "environmentalism" is a bad idea - to most people, an "environmentalist" is a wannabe do-gooder with no real grasp of reality. You know, the sort that seem to think we should ditch nuclear power because everyone knows that *every* power station chernobyls after a few years and that we can supply our entire power demand wi

Or you could pocket the money you saved on the solar installation, put it into a 20 year bond, and have $40,000 minus the $8000 in electricity for that interval. Just saying.

A big reason why alternative energy is not taking off, is because the economics are not attractive yet. If the economics were attractive, then there would be a massive demand for solar and wind, and that isn't happening very quickly

Indeed. Every story dealing with the climate, the charge is made that climate change is a conspiracy to deprive you of your freedom. And then it's never explained who is going to be taking the freedoms and what freedoms are going to be taken.

Well, aside from comments that "they" are going to regulate your breathing. I assume those comments aren't serious though. I vaguely recall someone arguing that it was just a plan by Al Gore to get laid. Not sure how many people subscribe to that particular co

I favor people being completely free to do anything that has no impact on shared resources. So build all the coal plants you want, as long as they don't vent to our shared atmosphere. Build a pipeline, but if it spills, you better have insurance sufficient to pay for the worst case cleanup effort. Etc. It's really all pretty straightforward and sane if you think about it.

You're saying some people who are urging us to fight a real problem have some special interest in it. I suppose that would be a conspiracy, but the climate change skeptics I was referring to are claiming that climate change is a hoax entirely.

Furthermore, that's a scheme to make money.

You want freedoms limited? Try building a coal fire power plant. Try putting in an oil pipeline between Canada and the US. Try and drill for oil or get a lease to drill for oil on any federal land.

Now you must be the one trolling or joking. Those aren't personal freedoms.

Green is fine (a few things, here and there, as a libertarian, I'd have to differ over, but many of their ideas are sound).New Green is insane (they're going places which make many of the older Greens say 'WTF').

Companies need to be told, in no uncertain terms, that illegal polluting will result in a fine that will more than offset the profits to be gained by doing so.

Note "illegal polluting." That means all the liberal government has to do is define anything as "illegal polluting" in order to implement your authoritarian dream. The concept did make sense for actual pollutants that actually hurt real people now, but that's not what you want. You want them to kowtow to you, bow to your god. Greenpeace was a good exa

It's also less impressive when you consider that Washington state, where MS is headquartered, produces nearly 75% of its electricity from renewable sources (hydroelectric source [choosewashington.com]) anyway. In effect, MS could easily be making zero effort at all to use "green" energy, and still be able to quote impressive looking figures.